Overcoming the Top Four Challenges for Virtualized Environments

Transcription

1 Overcoming the Top Four Challenges for Virtualized Environments Foglight for Virtualization delivers the functionality to monitor and manage Hyper-V, as well as your broader heterogeneous environment INTRODUCTION Server virtualization is a game-changing technology for IT today. Running multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical host enables organizations to maximize their server hardware investments, become far more agile and responsive, improve uptime and performance, ensure disaster recovery, and extend the life of legacy applications. For many years, there weren t a lot of options in virtualization technologies. Today, organizations have more choices. In particular, with the release of Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V has come into its own, delivering the scalability, performance, security, flexibility and resiliency required in enterprise deployments. Achieving the full promise of Hyper-V, though, requires overcoming four key challenges that affect any virtualized environment: Resource performance issues Virtual machines compete for the limited host resources. Administrators need to be able to quickly troubleshoot and proactively prevent performance issues that impact the business. Capacity management Administrators need to be able to optimize allocation of resources across hosts and plan for future growth. Storage and network bottlenecks Administrators need to be able to identify bottlenecks in the storage topology that impact VM performance. Chargeback and show-back reports IT needs to be able to calculate and itemize the costs associated with each department s use of VMs. Since the majority of virtualized environments are heterogeneous, it s critical to choose a and management solution that not only addresses these challenges, but addresses them across the entire IT ecosystem from a single pane of glass. Quest Foglight for Virtualization is the only solution that delivers the deep visibility and consistent experience you need across all your Hyper-V, VMware and physical hosts. Moreover, Foglight for Virtualization does not require Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), and it supports all major versions of Windows Server, including Windows 2012 R2, Windows 2012 and Windows 2008 R2.

2 Maintaining high application performance and availability without wasting resources requires deep insight into the virtualized environment. This technical brief explains how Foglight will help you overcome all the top challenges in your virtualized environment, with a particular focus on Hyper-V. CHALLENGE NO. 1: RESOURCE PERFORMANCE ISSUES Maximizing the value of a virtualized environment requires a careful balancing act: excess capacity in a given VM translates to wasted IT expenditure, while not enough capacity results in poor user experience. Maintaining high application performance and availability without wasting resources requires deep insight into the virtualized environment, including how VMs are competing for CPU, memory and storage resources. Get out in front of emerging issues in real time and troubleshoot them quickly Foglight for Virtualization delivers the visibility you need to effectively manage your Hyper-V or heterogeneous environment, with intuitive dashboards that show the current or historical status of the virtual environment. Visualizations show the health of your environment at the cluster level, at the server level, and all the way down to the individual virtual machine and the storage associated with it. For example, Figure 1 shows how Foglight for Virtualization visualizes resource utilization (CPU load, network I/O, memory and data store I/O) for a particular VM. Four levels of color coding (green, yellow, orange and red) enable you to immediately spot emerging issues (such as disk space getting low) or urgent problems (such as no free disk space remaining). In Figure 1, the red draws your attention to a serious concern: Two logical drives (P and G) on a particular VM (chi-fms-vm2) are running extremely low on capacity and one drive (F) is already out of capacity. Troubleshooting a problem couldn t be easier simply drill down to the details you need. For instance, Figure 2 shows resource utilization for each of the data stores connected to chi-fms-vm2, and the current allocation for the VM (128 GB). This detailed information enables you to take appropriate action to eliminate the resource performance issue. For example, you might choose to add capacity to the struggling VM or move some of its workloads elsewhere. Figure 1. Foglight for Virtualization provides intuitive dashboards that give you insight into your virtualized environment at a glance. 2

3 Figure 2. Foglight for Virtualization makes it easy to drill down to the details you need to pinpoint the root cause of a resource performance issue and resolve it quickly. Understand your environment from end to end However, because multiple VMs compete for resources, drilling down is not always enough. Often what you need is to broaden your view. Therefore, Foglight for Virtualization also provides a complete, end-to-end view that makes it easy to understand how resources are connected across your virtualized infrastructure integrating and visualizing information that you would otherwise need to try to dig out of two or three separate products and then piece together. For example, Figure 3 illustrates the I/O paths in use for a particular Hyper-V server (TAU-HV-3). This end-to-end topology will help you pinpoint the problem anywhere in the data path. For instance, you would be able to identify a single port that might be the source of an I/O performance problem. Foglight for Virtualization also provides a complete, end-to-end view that makes it easy to understand how resources are connected across your virtualized infrastructure. Figure 3. Visualizing the I/O paths for a particular Hyper-V server can help you diagnose performance problems such as high I/O wait in a particular VM. 3

4 Foglight for Virtualization includes a wide range of customizable alarm rules that are based on best practices and Quest s extensive experience and expertise with the Hyper-V environment. Figure 4. Foglight for Virtualization includes a wide range of rules that you can customize to create the alarms you need to stay on top of performance issues. Alarms Of course, administrators cannot stay glued to a dashboard. Accordingly, Foglight for Virtualization includes a wide range of alarm rules that you can easily customize to meet your needs (see Figure 4). These rules are based on best practices and Quest's extensive experience and expertise with the Hyper-V environment. Specify the thresholds that work for your organization to ensure that appropriate team members are notified by or text in real time when, for example, CPU usage surges or free space drops too low. Alarms provide all the critical details you need to start troubleshooting immediately. For instance, the alarm shown in Figure 5 alerts you that network I/O has deviated significantly from the norm (baseline) for a particular VM, and suggests that you investigate whether configuration changes could be responsible for the aberration. You can also easily suspend alerting during particular times, such as scheduled maintenance periods. Figure 5. Foglight for Virtualization s alarms help you spot issues as they arise and speed troubleshooting. 4

5 Baselining tailors to your environment, minimizing false alarms Most IT organizations manage by exception they watch for problems to arise or wait for alerts and then respond. As we have seen, Foglight for Virtualization enhances this widely used approach by providing a high-level view of your virtualized environment, highlighting emerging and critical issues in a comprehensive dashboard, and sending alarms according to the baseline criteria you set. Figure 6. Performance graphs include the baseline for the metric, shaded in gray, which can be different at different times of the day. The challenge in by exception, however, is accurately determining what exactly counts as an exception. Simply calculating the average value for a metric and alerting when that value is exceeded is not a workable strategy. As we know, virtual environments are dynamic. What is a normal workload at certain times can be an indication of a potentially significant issue at other times. For instance, a certain level of CPU utilization might be perfectly normal when everyone is logging on in the morning or when Finance is running quarterly reports even though it far exceeds the average. On the other hand, even below-average CPU utilization could be cause for real concern on a Sunday morning. In other words, using an average can both cause too many false alarms and fail to recognize real problems when they arise. Foglight for Virtualization enables effective by exception. Instead of relying on averages, it tailors its and alerting to your environment by building baselines that define normal activity during different time periods and then modifying those baselines as your enterprise grows and changes. For example, the blue line in Figure 6 graphs network utilization over time, and the range shaded in gray represents the baseline range for that metric. Note that the baseline is higher at 8 a.m. than it is at 10 a.m. to account for normal morning logon activities. With Foglight for Virtualization, then, you can easily see how performance compares to the norm for your environment at any given time, so you know exactly when to take action and when to take a (quick) coffee break. Moreover, issues become visible as they are emerging, rather than only when an issue becomes a full-fledged crisis. For example, you might see that although memory usage is within the baseline, it s nearing the limit, and then take steps to address the problem, preventing an alarm from ever being triggered. Expert help speeds remediation So far we ve seen how Foglight for Virtualization helps you accurately identify emerging and critical issues in your Hyper-V environment. But it goes further, by offering expert guidance in resolving those issues. Each alarm includes a Suggestion section, like the one shown in the alarm in Figure 5, with expert tips that will help administrators quickly resolve problems, no matter their level of experience with Hyper-V. Dashboards provide similar expert advice. Historical as well as real-time insight Finally, to effectively manage performance in your Hyper-V environment, you need not only current data, but a historical perspective. You might want to see how current performance compares to performance Foglight for Virtualization tailors its and alerting to your environment by building baselines that define normal activity during different time periods. 5

6 Capacity management is one of the most critical functions in managing a virtual environment. from yesterday or a week ago, or you might need to review the events leading up to a problem. Foglight for Visualization enables you to review Hyper-V performance at any point in time so you can thoroughly investigate problems and take steps to prevent their recurrence. CHALLENGE NO. 2: CAPACITY MANAGEMENT One of the major benefits promised by virtualization is cost savings. By creating virtual machines, organizations can consolidate workloads, and even applications that require different operating systems, on a single physical machine. As a result, they can purchase and maintain less hardware, which in turn reduces the data center footprint and associated power and cooling costs. Reaping this benefit, however, requires being able to properly provision VMs among physical machines, now and into the future making capacity management one of the most critical functions in managing a virtual environment. Capacity management can be broken down into four tasks: Capacity planning IT organizations need be able to review past resource requirements and forecast their future resource need, so they can budget accurately and procure resources in time to avoid performance and availability problems. Capacity allocation Administrators also need optimize available capacity to support current business requirements and support new workloads. Capacity optimization Administrators need to assess whether the resource allocation for a VM is appropriate for the current workload, or whether additional resources should be added or excess resources could be taken away. Capacity maintenance IT administrators need to make sure the environment performance is maintained as the number of users, the size of the database or other factors change. Figure 7. Foglight for Virtualization simplifies capacity management and reduces capital expenditures by identifying resource bottlenecks. 6

7 Take the guesswork out of capacity management, VM placement and workload allocation Foglight for Virtualization includes powerful functionality to assist with all of these capacity-management tasks in your Hyper-V and broader virtualized environment. Intelligent analysis and automation capabilities help you predict future hardware resource requirements, reserve capacity for planned VM deployments and automatically deploy VMs into reserved slots. You can see whether additional VMs could be added to a given cluster, or whether a given server has room for more VMs. For example, Figure 7 shows that the server being reviewed has room for 46 additional VMs insight that is extremely useful when you need to create new workloads. But Foglight for Virtualization doesn t stop there it also helps you understand the limiting factors for a given cluster or server, so you know exactly which resources you need to optimize your investment and avoid unnecessary expenditures. For example, if a server is able to accommodate more VMs, you might not need to go out and buy another server. Figure 7 illustrates a server that currently hosts 33 active VMs and has space for 46 more, given the current resource allocations. The Bottlenecks tab below shows that the primary limitation for the server is memory in other words, to get more than 46 additional VMs, you would need to add memory. The next limitation is CPU; with more memory but no more CPUs, you could add 81 VMs. The third limiting factor is storage; with additional memory and CPU but the current storage allocation, you could add 294 VMs. In other words, you can see at a glance how to accommodate nearly 10 times as many VMs on the server you already own. Scenario modeling Foglight for Virtualization also includes dynamic capacity planning features help you determine how to accommodate future workloads. Simply create what-if scenarios to experiment with mixing and matching VMs on a server. Figure 8 shows the resource utilization that would result if a given set of workloads were added to a particular server. The red lines represent the capacity on the server. In this case, CPU, network and storage utilization will be fine, but the workloads together will exceed the server s memory capacity. Foglight for Virtualization includes dynamic capacity planning features help you determine how to accommodate future workloads. Figure 8. Modeling what-if scenarios helps you discover how to make the most of your limited resources. 7

8 Figure 9. Tightly integration with Foglight for Storage Management enables Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise to provide a rich VM-to-LUN topology diagram. Foglight for Storage Management delivers end-to-end virtual infrastructure with logical visualization to help identify bottlenecks in the storage topology that impact VM performance. CHALLENGE NO. 3: STORAGE AND NETWORK BOTTLENECKS A high percentage of performance issues detected in virtualized environments are related to storage and network. Therefore, preventing and troubleshooting performance issues requires careful of storage objects. Foglight for Storage Management is tightly integrated with Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise and provides the end-to-end visibility you need to determine whether VM performance issues are originating in the host, fabric or storage array. Foglight for Storage Management delivers end-toend virtual infrastructure with logical visualization to help identify bottlenecks in the storage topology that impact VM performance. Specifically, Foglight for Storage Management collects data from the storage array and fabric, which is then coupled with the data that Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise collects from the Hyper-V environment in order to create a rich VM-to- LUN topology diagram with the performance metrics associated with each object (See Figure 9). To pinpoint the root cause of any current or historical performance issue, simply drill down into the specific metrics of each target device for details so you can quickly identify and remediate storage bottlenecks (See Figure 10). Foglight for Storage Management also identifies which VMs will be affected by maintenance of or technical issues with individual storage components, so you can take appropriate steps to prevent VM downtime. It also helps you proactively identify overcommitted storage pools Figure 10. Quickly identify and remediate storage bottlenecks. 8

9 Figure 11. Understanding storage usage over time helps with effective capacity planning. and aggregates so you can avoid performance problems and downtime. It will even analyze your storage consumption patterns to estimate when available capacity will be depleted so that you can proactively plan new disk purchases (See Figure 11). CHALLENGE NO. 4: CHARGEBACK AND SHOW-BACK REPORTS Often IT organizations are viewed as cost centers because they are not directly associated with revenue generation activities. However, IT provides the necessary infrastructure and technical support for other departments, such as sales, marketing, HR and finance, to do their jobs. Chargeback and show-back reports enable IT organizations to quantify the value of the services they provide, and they give other departments the feedback they need to become more responsible consumers of those services. Flexible billing options Foglight for Virtualization enables IT organizations to calculate the cost of Hyper-V virtual machines in two ways: Flat-tiered rate (FTR) FTR calculates a flat rate for a given virtual machine (for example, $500/month), regardless of how many hours it is actually used. Measured resource utilization (MRU) MRU calculates cost based on usage. For example, if HR has used a requested VM for four hours, it will be charged for only four hours instead of a full monthly flat rate. MRU is billed in increments of one hour. Foglight for Virtualization also enables you to add on costs, such as software licensing fees, network costs, and power consumption expenses. For instance, a department might be billed an additional $50/month on top of the FTR or MRU fees to pay for the rack space required for the server hosting the Hyper-V virtual machine it uses. Chargeback and show-back reports enable IT organizations to quantify the value of the services they provide, and they give other departments the feedback they need to become more responsible consumers of those services. 9

10 Foglight for Virtualization monitors not just Hyper-V but your entire virtualized environment, including VMware, Citrix user sessions, NetScaler performance, network latency, database applications, Exchange and Active Directory. Figure 12. Creating a chargeback report Easy-to-read scheduled reports Foglight for Virtualization enables you to easily create chargeback and showback reports using the interface shown in Figure 12. You can schedule the reports to run on a regular basis and share them with the appropriate department so they can see the breakdown of their consumption and understand their total cost (See Figure 13). Figure 13. Sample chargeback report 10

11 Foglight uniquely extensible platform Modular capabilities enable maximum team collaboration based on a common platform and a single version of the truth APM Application support teams DB performance Database admins Infrastructure performance Infrastructure admins User experience management Application server DB infra IT exec dashboards Transaction Virtualization management IT ops analytics Service level and triage Physical server DB infra Virtualization management DB workload analysis Storage performance management DB diagnostics Virtualization management Microsoft Exchange Active Directory Storage Operating system Cloud VDI Figure 14. Foglight s modular design and broad scope provide a single version of the truth, so teams can work together effectively to maintain high performance and availability. CONCLUSION Maximizing your investment in Hyper-V requires overcoming the four key challenges in any virtualized environment: resource performance issues, capacity management, storage and network bottlenecks, and chargeback and show-back reports. While other solutions can provide a subset of the functionality you need, only Foglight for Virtualization offers a complete solution, plus visualization and automation that simplifies and speeds troubleshooting and management of Hyper-V. Moreover, Foglight for Virtualization monitors not just Hyper-V but your entire virtualized environment, including VMware, Citrix user sessions, NetScaler performance, network latency, database applications, Exchange and Active Directory. With administrators from all these areas looking through the same pane of glass, organizations can eliminate finger-pointing and crowded troubleshooting calls, and instead quickly resolve performance problems to keep the business moving forward. One Version of the Truth - Quest Foglight Performance Monitoring Platform. Operations management web UI console Visualize Analyze Optimize The one solution that does it all Performance Capacity planning and management Configuration and change management Optimization and automation Chargeback and showback Foglight database host VMware View Forensic analytics Foglight Management server host App OS VMware vsphere IntelliProfile adaptive analytics App OS Microsoft Hyper-V Environment efficiency analytics Active Directory Foglight agent manager vsphere APIs VMware View API vcloud Director API SSH, WinRM, WMI Data center infrastructure VM VMware vcloud Datacenter Exchange Figure 15. Foglight for Virtualization s architecture 11

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